There are Moors on the coast
Honorable Deputies of the Spanish Parliament: listen to me, there are Moors on the coast(*)!
Honorable Deputies of the Cortes Generales of the Kingdom of Spain, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the sad and bloody attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004, I would like to address the pending issue of the importance of teaching the Amazigh (Berber) language to "Moorish" citizens and emigrants, as a means of preventing Islamist radicalism.
It is very peculiar to see that, in the current Congress of Deputies of the Kingdom of Spain, the pro-Polisario Saharawis have a representation in the person of the deputy of Sumar, Mrs. Tesh Sidi, and that the citizens of Moroccan origin, "the Moors", who amount to more than one million people, between those who have the Spanish nationality and the emigrants who have not yet obtained it, do not have any parliamentary representation.
Not even in the Autonomous City of Melilla, the "Muslim" citizens, the "Moors" better said, or the "Amazighs" as they should be called, have not yet been able to elect any deputy to represent them in the General Courts of Madrid! Consequently, I ask you to dedicate me a little of your longed-for time to raise me, for a moment, in the voice of this important silent community.
It is obvious to know that, at present, the most naturalized migrants in the European Union are Moroccans. In 2022 they reached 112 700 with about 49,2 % obtained the Spanish nationality, against 27,5 % the Italian nationality and only 14,3 % the French nationality.
On November 7, 2022/2972, I had the honor to send a correspondence to Mrs. Pilar Alegria, as Minister of Education and Vocational Training of the Government of Pedro Sanchèz, which is framed in the Spanish-Moroccan Joint Declaration of April 7, 2022, and in the priorities of the new bilateral relations and agreements with Morocco, embodied in the high-level meeting of February 1 and 2 last year 2023/2973.
In this letter, I had expressed our deep anger regarding your offer to your Moroccan counterpart minister to teach only Arabic to the sons and daughters of emigrants of Moroccan origin, to the total exclusion of the other co-official language of the Alawite Kingdom, Amazigh.
I had stressed to him that everything that is undertaken with the Arabic language, must also be accompanied with Amazigh, since this language, recognized in Article 5 of the Constitution of July 1, 2011/2961, has its own Organic Law No. 26.16, adopted unanimously by the two chambers of the Moroccan parliament in 2019/2969.
I had also highlighted to him that 'Amazigh language' is also a language belonging to the Spanish State itself, unfortunately and unjustly, marginalized by the educational authorities in the schools of the two North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla, despite Spain's commitment to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which came into force since August 1, 2001.
Honorable Deputies,
What I am asking you now, as representatives of the nation and of the peoples of the Spanish State, is to request your will in favor of the defense that the Amazigh language be included in the educational programs of infant and primary education in the cities of Melilla and Ceuta, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the conventions of the European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages, which came into force in August 2001, and, on the other hand, in the bilateral agreements signed with the countries of North Africa, and more specifically with the Kingdom of Morocco, in particular the bilateral agreements concerning the "Teaching of the Language and Culture of Origin (ELCO)" for the daughters and sons of "Moorish" emigrants.
Know well that if these "Moorish" children have a high rate of school failure (those of Melilla beat all records in Europe), it is because their language, Amazigh, as a mother tongue (and also indigenous), is not yet integrated in any school curriculum.
As stated by the great French linguist Alain Bentolila, already in 2019: "the educational systems of certain countries, however expensive they may be, have become machines for manufacturing illiteracy and school failure because they have never been able (or wanted) to resolve the issue that tears them apart: the choice of the language of instruction.
They lead pupils to cruel failures because the school welcomed them in a language that their mothers did not teach them, and this, for a child, is an intolerable violence, and that on the solid foundation of their mother tongue they will be given the possibility of access to reading and writing, and that later, we can build an ambitious learning of the official languages".
This is something that UNESCO and, more recently, the World Bank, have been constantly recommending. Indeed, these school failures inflate the illiteracy rates, which is, after all, at the origin of the buying and selling of votes at the elections in the Maghreb countries in general, and in the cities of Ceuta and Melilla in particular, where justice is currently prosecuting all the "Moorish" leaders of Coalition for Melilla!
Honorable Deputies,
Be assured that to continue to insist on taking no action in this pending matter is to continue to condemn these young "Moors" to marginalization, illiteracy and delinquency. Bear in mind, for example, that the Generalitat de Catalunya, which has a population of 8 million people, welcomes some 235,278 Moroccans in 2022/2972, a percentage of 0.03%. However, its prisons seem to host more than 50% of "Moorish" ethnicity!
Not only to delinquency, but worse, to Islamist radicalism, and even to jihadist terrorism. You should know that it is no coincidence that the perpetrators of the tragic terrorist attacks in Madrid, twenty years ago, as well as those in Paris on November 13, 2015, in Brussels on March 22, 2016 and in Barcelona on August 17 and 18, 2017 are, in their overwhelming majority, Moroccans.
Even more, they are of Amazigh origin, and curiously from the Rif region! In this regard, the Spanish press was not wrong to openly attack the Kingdom of Morocco as the main source of international jihadism. The newspaper "La Razón" affirmed that: "70% of the jihadist terrorists who have attacked in Europe during the last fifteen years are of Moroccan nationality.
The Alaouite kingdom has become the cradle of radicalization for young people committed to jihad''. What the weekly ''Jeune Afrique'' headlined on one of its covers: ''Terrorisme. Born in Morocco''.
However, if these young people fell into Salafist radicalism, their causes are not due, as you may think, and as the great majority of European and Iberian "experts" on Islamism usually advance, to their Islamic religion, but rather to another factor that goes unnoticed.
The root cause is simply due to the failure to educate them in their mother tongue, in violation of Articles 7 and 8 of the 1989 International Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 8 of which specifies that: "States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations, recognized by law, without unlawful interference".
Let me explain the reasons. Germany is a country with some 300,000 or so residents of Moroccan origin and more than three million of Turkish origin. Its security services at one time estimated that some 800 young Germans were seduced and recruited by Daech for Syria.
If religion, in this case Islam, had direct causes in this recruitment of these young people in favor of the inhuman and deadly theses of ISIS, the German police would have found ten times more young Turks than those of Moroccan origin. Curiously, they found that there were many young people of Moroccan origin and almost none of Turkish origin, who are also Muslims!
In this sense, the reasons for recruitment to the jihadist theses are not related to religion, but rather to a subject to which we do not usually give importance, that of the "identity crisis".
Another more convincing argument is provided by German educators who were surprised that in the 1992/93 school year, in the city of Dortmund only 7.3% of Moroccan pupils managed to complete their primary schooling and only 5.29% in the Lander of Hesse. Moreover, in the specialized schools for troubled children, Moroccans constituted the largest contingents.
The educational authorities of the German Landers, by their pragmatism and responsibility, had the merit to develop and implement the ELCO-based educational program, namely 'Teaching the Language and Culture of Origin' in the 1980s and 1990s, in conformity with the European directive of July 25, 1977 aimed at educating the children of migrant workers.
This allowed its educational authorities to sign appropriate agreements with the countries of emigration (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Morocco...), with the aim of providing complementary courses in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Turkish and Arabic... for the children of migrants....
The results were spectacular for schoolchildren of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Polish origin, including those of Islamic religion, such as Turks, Iranians and Afghans.
All pupils improved their performance and their integration in the German school, and, consequently, school failure was significantly reduced, allowing for better social, professional and occupational integration. Unfortunately, this was not at all the case for the pupils of Moroccan origin. On the contrary, their results worsened even more!
Why was this the case?
The answer lies in the simple fact that these children of North African origin were not "Arabs", that they were not of Arab culture and identity, nor did they know the Arabic language.
They did not get along with the Moroccan teachers, hired by the Moroccan authorities because these children were (and still are) almost entirely Amazighs, originating from the Rif mountains and more specifically from the cabilas of the Guelaya confederation (like the Amazighs of Melilla).
For example, if the Turkish students understood perfectly well the teachers sent by their government in Ankara, the students of Moroccan origin did not understand at all the Arabic-speaking teachers.
The latter have contributed, on the contrary, to accentuating their "identity crisis", to undervaluing them, to damaging their "self-esteem" and thus condemning them to the margins of society, to inflating unemployment and spreading delinquency, to multiply drug trafficking networks (see now the great threat that the bloodthirsty and ruthless Mocro Maffia has reached in the Netherlands and Belgium, and its growing monopoly of cocaine trafficking, and its settling of scores that reach as far as the Costa del Sol! ).
Unfortunately, some of these "alienated" children end up, fatally, in the Islamist radicalism, and, even to become 'human bombs'.
Instead of integrating, first and foremost, Amazigh as a mother tongue, instead of helping children of North African origin to recover the original values of their authentic and millenary Amazigh identity, based on the social values of rejection of hatred, rejection of violence, respect for nature and women, values of freedom, equality and democracy, as proposed by the values of host schools in European countries, imposing on them the teaching of classical Arabic, leads, ineluctably, to alienation and radicalization, to the alienation and Salafist radicalization of European residents and citizens, originating from Morocco and North Africa, as revealed by the relevant and pertinent study of Manuel Llamas in the city of Melilla [9], where the Civil Guard, the National Police and the intelligence services (with the cooperation with their Moroccan counterparts) do not cease to disarticulate jihadist cells (such as that of September 26, 2014, that of September 6, 2017, that of October 4, 2022 or that of October 23, 2023 .... ).
In short, if you do not take legislative measures in favor of teaching Amazigh to "Moorish" children, there will be "Moors on the coast"!
By Rachid RAHA,
President of the Amazigh World Assembly